A large number of various dedicated hardware devices that are still intensively increasing exist in the networks of the telecom operators, it is always required to add more new dedicated hardware devices when a new network service is launched, and the space for placing the devices and supplying power for the devices become more and more difficult, and the accompanying difficulties also include the aggravated rise of energy costs, the challenge of capital investments and lack of essential design skills, and hardware devices with increasingly complicated integration and operation. In addition, the life cycle of the hardware devices is very short, and such that a large amount of purchasing-design-integration-deployment is required to perform, which is almost worthless repetition to incoming. Worse still, the life cycle of the hardware begins to get short, but the innovation speed of the services is accelerating, which restrains obtaining additional income from the network service innovation, and constraints the innovation of the increasingly networked connective world.
The object of the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is to solve the above problem by unifying many network device types into the industrial standard high-capacity servers, switches and storages which may be placed in a data center, a network node and a terminal, with the Information Technology (IT) standardized virtualization technology.
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a network virtualization architecture approved by the majority of researchers and research institutions in the related art, wherein:
a network Management & Orchestration Platform (MOP) takes charges of establishing and managing a network virtualization operating environment, which includes coordinating and managing a Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) domain and a Network Function Virtualization Service (NVFS) domain; and the MOP includes a Network Function Virtualization Orchestration (NFVO) and a Virtual Network Function Management (VNFM), wherein the NFVO is mainly responsible for the service orchestration of the whole network and the network resource management, and the VNFM is mainly responsible for the Virtual Network Function (VNF) resource management;
a main function of a Cloud Management System (CMS) is to implement the cloud management and monitoring;
a main function of a Transport Network Management System (TNMS) is to manage and monitor a transport IP layer network;
a main function of the Hypervisor (program management)/Virtual Machine Management (VMM) is to implement the virtualization capability and virtualize the hardware resources to a plurality of Virtual Machines (VM);
the Operate Support System (OSS)/Element Management System (EMS) is an operator element management background, and takes charges of managing and monitoring the virtual network element service logic; and
a Virtual Network Function (VNF) loads corresponding network element software versions by a virtual machine, and virtualizes physical network elements in the operator networks.
Wherein, an Operator Management Unit (OMU) is a network element operation and maintenance management unit, and in a virtualization deployment scenario, the OMU is required to add an interface with the network management system/OSS, so as to implement the monitoring and management on the virtual machine of the belonged virtual network element;
a Virtual Network Sub Function (VNSF) component is a software subfunction module of the virtual network element, one network element may be disassemble into a plurality of subfunction components, each function component completes one function, and the components of the same type may be required to map into one or more VMs according to the processing capability;
a server, a storage device and a transport network device are the network virtualization infrastructure, which mainly provides a hardware resource pool for the network virtualization.
In the network element virtualization scenario, in order to improve the performance and reliability of the VNF, generally it is required to use the concurrent processing mode of a plurality of VNFs or a plurality of VNFCs within the VNF, the Load Balance (LB) is the key to solve the problem, and the basic architecture of the LB mechanism in the related art is as shown in FIG. 2.
In the architecture of the related art, traffics are basically aggregated to the LB firstly, the LB performs a traffic allocation according to a load balancing policy, and in the future clouded network model, the VNF may be expanded infinitely, and as a result, the LB will become a bottleneck of the network. Especially when a forwarding plane device of the 4G mobile network is also virtualized at the later period, the forwarding plane data are also required to pass through the LB. Certainly, the LB may use a layered mode, but the complexity of the network topology will be increased on one hand, and the network investment cost will also be increased on the other hand.